Elpida Drops Plans to Acquire Taiwanese DRAM Companies.

Elpida Memory, the world's No. 3 supplier of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), announced drop of plans to acquire memory manufacturers from Taiwan since managements of the latter do not want this. Instead, Elpida will continue to outsource production of DRAM to Taiwan and will look at China.

For several years now Elpida has been trying to acquire stakes in Taiwan-based DRAM makers and even once attempted to form a large memory conglomerate with support from the Taiwanese government. While the "Taiwan Memory Company" eventually failed, Elpida still saw success with its expansion plans: the Rexchip Semiconductor (a joint venture between Elpida and Powerchip Semiconductor) is ramping up manufacturing and Powerchip recently decided to sell its whole DRAM output to Elpida. Besides, the company managed to establish relations with Winbond over manufacturing of GDDR5. In addition, Elpida is still considering buying a stake in ProMOS Technologies.

However, facing the opposition of numerous Taiwan-based companies when it comes to integration, Elpida's primary strategy will be changed. Instead of trying to acquire those manufacturers, the Japan-based DRAM supplier will attempt to collaborate with them to "enter China".

“We 100 percent agree to jointly move into China, because if we move into China by ourselves, we’ve a 99.99 percent chance to fail,” said Mr. Sakamoto without elaborating.